Lemon Girls
by mayhit
Summary: Lindsey dies.
1. Chapter 1

_Title: Lemon Girls._

_Spoilers: Vague?_

_Rating: R for sex, death and swearing._

_Disclaimer: I own zip._

_Summary: Lindsey dies._

_Author's notes: Quite dark actually. Be warned. _

_So as per usual I meant to write less than a thousand words but the story wouldn't have it. I'm not sure I nailed this piece because it has been quite an ambitions thing so far. I had so much fun trying to juggle all the characters and work them all in without going out of character for any of them. As I said, I tried._

_Feed Back: I particularly want to know… _

_1. What lines you felt were most on character. _

_2. Which characters I nailed. _

_3. Which ones I really didn't._

_4. I meant this to be a Catherine piece but she got shorted because I was enjoying seeing how the other characters could respond to her tragedy. Sara somehow ends up getting the most syllable time and I want to know if the story came off as unbalanced because of it. Thanks._

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Lindsey dies.

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Day one:

A body like a picked flower, cast onto the street and fifteen flashing red and blue light bulbs. Now Brass understands why people hate the cops. _"If the grim fucking reaper had a thousand decibel siren attached to his ass." _

There's a small red Honda parked in a 'No Parking' zone and when Brass asks the driver if he's had anything to drink the answer is a resounding, "No!" followed by dry heaving (any liquids are long gone- already soaked up by the thirsty Vegas lawn).

Despite the violent way the man's shoulders are shaking, he isn't drunk- brass knows that smell, like rotting pickles.

Brass, who has never understood the morbid curiosity of a Crime Scene Investigator, gets him self out of the way- walks three blocks to the nearest bar. He stands in front of it- small, one story building full of cigarettes and cue chalk. The words 'addictive personality' are staring him in the face.

Catherine is back at the lab, oblivious. _"Well, I can't tell her the news if I'm drunk."_ decides Brass. He finally turns away from the tacky flickering neon, imagining a much less sober phone conversation than the one he's about to have:

"_Itss your daughter… whass her name? Lindsey, yeah. Well, You uh- you sure don't have to worry bout a buncha porn-fer-brains boyfrienss anymore."_

Brass hangs a right and ends up two blocks down, sitting on a wooden park bench with a sliver in his palm and his cell phone ringing in his ear. She answers after the second ring. He can hear the fax machine in the background. Can hear her busy heels punching the floor and Doc Robbin's voice. _Trading one body for another_.

"Catherine," says Brass, "it's Lindsey-" By the stillness on the other end of the line he thinks she probably already knows but he says a little more for good measure.

She chokes into the phone a moment before the line goes dead.

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Day two:

Just one rusty Honda on the corner of 53rd and "Internal Bleeding" Avenue.

That's what 'Fredric the Insensitive Lab Tech' calls it when Catherine's out of the room. Warrick's in the room though and the look on his face leaves nothing to uncertainty. He balls the print out of his victim's tox screen into a wad and lets it skitter silently from his hand to the floor.

"What did you say?" asks Warrick.

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When Nick manages to drag Warrick from the room it is with flailing limbs. Nick will have grip shaped bruises on his arms tomorrow.

"What's your problem?" yells the tech, tidying spilt papers into stacks. Fredric is new in the lab. It's his second shift and he's only met Catherine once- never met her daughter.

Never will.

"They're outsiders, Man," says Nick ten minutes later. Both men sit on the hood of Nick's car in the parking lot, feeling the last of the engine's warmth still seeping into the night air. "They've got no idea what this is about."

Warrick picks at the bubbling paint, doesn't apologize for the mess he's making of Nicks three hundred dollar hood. "If we could just _do something_-," says Warrick, "instead of standing around waiting for what? A funeral? That's crap."

Nick shakes his head. "It's not about forensics, 'Rick- you know that." And Warrick, digging his fingertips into his denim clad knees, spits, "Oh yeah? Then what is it about?"

Nick is the only man anyone has known to ever sleep with a prostitute out of the goodness of his heart (He'll say he was just thinking with his pants but Nick watched her breathing for five minutes before she kicked him out. He counted seven different colors of brunette on that girl's head.)

Mr. High School Dependable.

Of course it would be Nick who slips off the hood of the car, brushes his hands through his hair as thought trying to grip something he hasn't been able to, and says, "Well… maybe we just care more."

But ten minutes earlier…

Nick pulls Warrick out of the lab by sheer force of will alone. Catherine is in a room down the hall wearing pursed lips and eyeliner. She isn't planning on tears.

Warrick- needing to drown out the sound of his own grief- buries his face in the sweater fabric of Nick's shoulder and sobs, just for a moment. Archie sneaks out into the hall to identify the commotion- sees this open-mouthed desperation and ducks quietly away. "Men don't cry," says Nick, "we just sweat from our eyes." And both men manage to laugh tightly- head for the parking lot and the comfort of Vegas air at night.

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Nick and Warrick joined the lab the year after Lindsey was born. By coincidence they both came by the lab the day before their first shift to get their bearing. Catherine was there, looking to get butterfly samples for the walls of her kitchen from Grissom. They met her first in the same parking lot they've taken refuge in tonight. She had a stroller gripped tightly in her hands.

Catherine was wearing a halter-top, yellow and green- Catherine's hair was pinned in a mess on top of her head, dashing into her face like the flares of a firework. Both Willows women were nearly silent, springtime pale and smelling of pablum.

Mother and daughter- they would look alike, walk alike, speak alike- their blue eyes staring upwards, seducing the sky.

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Day three:

The coroner's report gets leaked out by the third day. It doesn't take much- another nosey lab tech and 68 hours worth of repressed curiosity. _"People's professionalism is a weak front,"_ thinks Grissom. He is more silent than usual, watching a tarantula in a glass case as though, for the first time he can see the ugliness in it.

Sara crosses her arms in front of her to block a shiver. Finally, she turns towards the door. She's in his office again without knowing why.

She's half way out before his voice catches up with her. These moments between them, breathless and underdeveloped- this is when she always feels like a dog on a choke chain, dashing away before realizing she's hung up somewhere further back along the line. "Sara-"

Grissom is more compulsive than usual. She's never seen him take on trivialities before and now the whole lab is nervous because of it. Sara blinks a moment, guesses her own heart rate, _"125bpm"_ and turns back to face him.

Of all the useless things he could have said:

"Let me know if you'd like to take some time off."

"There's no such thing, Grissom."

Their relationship is compiled of, _"time off,"_ and, _"time off without pay,"_ and, _"overtime," _and, _"Ecklie wants me to fire you."_ Sara shuts the door behind her when she goes. It's the first time he knows he loves her.

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It only takes thee days before curiosity gets the better of someone. "It had to happen sooner or later," says Catherine blankly. She is eating her lunch with the TV on mute, and a pair of four-inch heels on her feet. "Hey Cat," says Greg from the coffee maker. "Y'know stiletto is a kind of knife?" beat. "Cuz, _yikes_." She regards him with a look in her eyes, unflinching. He thinks, _"Now I know what it looks like to break down on a cellular level."_

Catherine would tear herself apart from the inside out if she knew how. She smokes on her smoke breaks and wears shoes with angry names.

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Sara is playing with a pair of left handed scissors when Hodges passes her the results of a fabric search and says, "Did you know it took Willows' daughter six minutes to drown in her own blood?" Hodges is incredulous. "The PD was practically there. If that idiot in the car had done the CPR she probably could have-"

Sara slaps the scissors down on the desk. They clatter and fall silent. She leaves before he can finish.

Greg finds Sara in the break room with shards of glass sparkling dangerously on the linoleum. She's broken the 6" by 6" mirror hung on her locker door. "You know, crying is less expensive." Says Greg, approaching her slowly _("Always maintain eye contact." _Discovery channel trivia for seven-year-olds

She and he kneel close to each other and clean up the pieces. Small dusty slivers work their way into his fingertips but he doesn't feel them. He's watching her. When she sweeps her palm over the floor looking for stray shards he can see the blood and flecks of glass still glistening on her knuckles. His throat tightens until he isn't sure he can speak without shattering. _"This is not part of the deal,"_ thinks Greg. _"I'm not going to love you if you're going to be breaking things."_ He takes her hand in his and gently brushes off the skin. "Come on," he wheedles, "don't make me do it for you."

"Do what?"

"Cry."

If he were Grissom, Sara would pull her hand away and quote some appropriate verse:

"'-_a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.'_ Jean Anouilh."

"Anouilh was referring to propaganda, Sara."

"I know… but I was referring to anger."

She would leave Grissom to his own desperate composure. She would shiver in the hall and feel his breath on her shoulder for hours.

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Seven-year-old Greg Sanders wants Kool-Aid when he has root beer, wants root beer when he has Kool-Aid, wants Pepsi most of all but his mom _never_ buys that kind. No one ever wants what they can get. It's a little bit tragic, perhaps, but who really likes comedy anyway?

Sara lets him slowly trace his fingertips along her bare skin. Because she allows it, Greg knows this doesn't mean much.

He finds it funny. Lindsey's death was surprisingly neat; there was almost no blood on the body- all the damage blooming post mortem, like clouds in an overcast sky. Two days later, it's Sara Sidle's blood on his own fingers, and on his face because he's kissing her wounds.

When her knuckles touch his lips he means it to be something else entirely- s_oft touch- gentle, gentle. All better now, Sara_- but then his mouth is kinda open and she smells like grape bubble gum and the sound she makes when he touches her is low enough for him to feel the reverberations.

Her eyes are dry, his are glassy wet and he ends up licking the sticky moisture off of her skin in a rush. Sara watches him tongue the blood from her knuckles- holds her breath and bites back ten responses that are lies- a dozen more that are true.

"Oh god," she whispers when what she really means is, _"Grissom,"_ and then catches her breath and amends for both statements, "I don't believe in him any way."

When she leaves the room she wipes Greg's saliva from her knuckles. She has epithelials waiting.


	2. Chapter 2

_Part 2. Read on. Blah, Blah. Thanks._

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Day four:

One shift's worth of requests for everyone to, "Please not talk about the accident." Another 24 hours worth of hissed threats to, "Shut the hell up, everyone." Everyone blames their curiosity on Grissom.

"Why do you think he's letting her stay at work?"

"Overtime _mentoring_?"

Nick and Warrick try to take Catherine out for breakfast at the end of shift. They order too much food and eat almost nothing. The eggs are greasy; everything is greasy. Catherine is still chewing painfully around a piece of toast when her Orange Julius is set down.

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Sunday morning. Lindsey was three and a half- already babbling a flood of words. Catherine finds toys in the couch like evidence of an angel and knows: her and Ed and midnight bedroom fights and broken china on the kitchen floor- it was all worth it a hundred times over.

Lindsey calls Sunday 'The Mommy Morning' because Catherine's off work. "Juice!" says Lindsey "Please!"

They're drawing rainbows at the kitchen table. "What comes after orange?" wonders Catherine and Lindsey giggles wildly- "Lemon! Lemon!" When Catherine reads the color label on the crayon it says 'Lemon' in small black print. Lindsey is three and a half. She can't read but she can read 'Lemon'. Catherine asks her again the next day with a flash card.

"Lemon! Lemon! Lemon!" squeals Lindsey.

Catherine never mentions it to Grissom. Some mysteries are more valuable unsolved.

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In the diner Catherine looks at her Orange Julius. Wedged onto the rim of the glass is a slice of lemon. _"Yellow,"_ thinks Catherine. She leaves the table awkwardly, knocking over the saltshaker without even noticing.

Of the two men, Warrick agrees to go after her. "I'll square up at the counter," says Nick and heads for the till. He pays with a twenty five percent tip because any math above basic percentages is eluding him. "Excuse me, where are your washrooms?"

Nick locks himself in a bathroom stall and presses his forehead against the door. _"Deep Breaths, Stokes."_ The stall is three feet by four feet, is eight feet high. Nick shudders, swallows down greasy eggs- remembers ants.

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Catherine's in the diner parking lot, pre-dawn, when someone from the strip wanders by. "Heard about your daughter," says this older man, eyeing her legs. She can't even remember if he was an old friend or someone she once danced for. She isn't sure there's a difference.

"It's like being haunted by the wrong fucking ghosts,"says Catherine. (Her ghosts are all alive. By association she feels closer to death.) She is standing with a cigarette in her fingers, smoke coiling elegantly into the atmosphere.

"You sure as heck never get the right one's" he answers her. He's beyond understanding what he means. Maybe this is how Grissom feels.

He can tell by the way that she's standing, legs apart, hips thrust out, _"Fucking funeral tomorrow," _that she doesn't believe there is any remains of Lindsey watching. He tries that appeal anyway, takes the cigarette and grinds it out with his black-soled shoe.

"What would Lindsey say, Cath?" she shivers and the hairs on her arms stand up, glistening in the pale sunlight. He puts his coat around her slender shoulders.

"Past that," drawls Catherine. She wishes they would just let her pull her body apart in peace.

When Warrick does up the front zipper it is with her arms crossed inside of the leather like a straight jacket. She doesn't facilitate or protest. His hands are clumsy in the morning cold and his fingers accidentally brush the space between her breasts. Her eyes- for their part- stay locked on the corner of the parking lot- half focused. Such close contact- it isn't the first time Warrick forgets Tina all together. Catherine doesn't look at him when she says, "Would you like to come back to my place?"

He'll say no, of course. He'll kiss her gently in the parking lot where, through the diner window, even Nicky can see. In place of vow breaking and a stuttering of "Oh God- Damn! Please!" there will be a brushing of tongues and noses (she smells like all sorts of yellow flowers). When they pull away she will turn towards the car and he will follow.

Catherine has the keys. Nick is the only one who bother's to wonder if that's safe.

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Day five:

The funeral. Everyone comes, of course, but no one stays. "No one who matters anyway," says Greg to Nick, eyeing the crowds of Swing Shift strangers. "Outsiders," mutters Nick, but quietly- repeating his words from three nights ago.

Catherine is the first to leave. Striding amidst headstones over the dew soaked lawn in her black shoes. The heels stick into the soft ground like a knife into a body.

Sara and Grissom stand over the indentations left behind and contemplate filling them with plaster. Then pretend they aren't the kind of people who come to their friend's daughter's funeral and think about work.

Sara watches Catherine get behind the wheel of a company car.

DUI. DUI. DUI.

"_Under the influence of what?" _Sara considers the vague government terminology. She thinks that Grief can often be as inebriating as Crown Royal. She turns to Grissom and knows by the resignation on his face: In a kidnapping the first 24 hours are golden. In Catherine's case they're running on 110. They will not be bringing her back from this.

Sara wonders aloud, "Grissom… what's she like?"

Grissom looks up from his divot. They are standing between headstones belonging to the Walton's and the Warner's. They worked the Warner case three years ago- Second-degree murder. Patricide.

"Who? Catherine?"

"What's she like waking up?" and then casually, "Waking up to?"

Grissom looks out across the windy horizon. Chimes are audible in the distance. "Do you think I know the answer to that Sara?"

Sara smiles bitterly and tucks hair behind her ear. "Yeah, I do."

Grissom sighs. His hands always shake when she intrudes like this but he's got them deep in the shadows of his pockets and hidden from the searching brunette beside him. "Catherine is… vital."

Sara blinks, tugs at several various hemlines, and smiles a sneer. "Thanks Grissom, I really needed that clarity." Her long fingers are digging through her purse, the inside pockets of which are cast in shadows. Grissom can't see what she carries with her- but then, how is that a change? Funeral or no, today has twenty-four hours. People are committing crimes. It's mostly the same.

She finally takes a pair of tweezers from one of the shadowed pockets- kneels to the ground but keeps her eyes on his a moment, making it clear: _"Tell me more."_

"Catherine is a _person_, Sara- she isn't anything like-" he breaks off.

Sara pulls something rubber and U shaped from the ground. The small treaded cap from a stiletto heel. Sara Sidle in the only plunging neckline he's ever seen her wear. "I had to borrow a dress last minute from some rental thing," she had said- apologizing for her own body. Twenty minutes later she pulls Catherine's missing heel from the muddy earth and when she draws a strap back onto her shoulder she leaves a muddy fingerprint behind. He would be made breathless if he weren't already. They are both too tired for this to be happening.

"She isn't like what, Grissom? Me?"

Grissom kicks the grass, scuffs his shoes. They were scuffed already anyway. "Us."

The winter wind has stripped them both colorless but Sara can at least manage a sneer for this. _"There is no 'Us'."_ She drops the rubber heel, dirt and all into her purse and swallows down grief, which tastes like salt. Grissom watches the muscles moving in her neck. He wants to lick the pain out of her throat. To fall asleep in the evening for once and whisper into the dark tangle of her hair on his pillow, "You're a ghost Sara Sidle."

As though he isn't already much too late. Standing in a graveyard in the company of a woman who eludes syllables. "How many of these body's have we investigated?" she wonders aloud. He can smell the lab on her, even now, under all that funeral perfume.

Greg comes over and suddenly it's, "Hey Grissom," and Greg's got his hand on Sara's shoulder. Bare skin- bare fingers- _transfertransfertransfer._

"Hello Greg."

It doesn't have to mean anything- Greg's hand obstructing his view of Sara's freckles- the innocence of touch. But Greg is calm and Greg is intent- he follows Sara's shoulder down. "_It's like watching an electric current,"_ thinks Grissom. _"Entering there where the strap of her dress creates a border-" _Greg's fingers sliding- _"down her bicep to her elbow where the cuff of her black glove begins." _The whole timeSara never takes her eyes off Grissom. The fingers of her left hand twitch, involuntarily, like a cat hunting in its sleep.

"What I told Sara goes double for you Greg. If you need some time off-"

"I got it-," says Greg. "Thanks Gris."

Grissom ends the moment, like closing a case- he can do this- _has _done this. He's already five steps away when he hears Sara's lilting voice. "Let's just go." She speaks her words forcefully pronounced into Greg's ear but the wind catches them and scatters them like dry mowed grass. Grissom has interrogated a thousand suspects- more. He knows that sound, the droop of surrender in a female voice. "Greg, let's just go."

He doesn't turn to watch as Sara exhaustedly lets the young lab tech search through her purse for her keys. Now Greg knows Sara better than Grissom does.

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Catherine's locked in the public washroom of Marty's Diner. She's sixteen blocks from St. Gabriel's Graveyard. She parked her car four blocks down and started walking. It wasn't until she was crossing from 63rd Street onto "Drug Deal" Boulevard that she found what she was looking for.

The man wore nice clothes but they were dirty- Catherine could see the places where his nose had been broken. Fist, pipe, two by four, kick to the head. Catherine took one look at 'Frank the Dealer' and all his external scars. She decided that all pain led to fundamentally the same place.

"_How disappointing,"_ thinks Catherine, _"it only took thirty five seconds to exchange a fifty dollar bill for some powder I've been avoiding since the god damn Jurassic period." _It's been thirteen years since she bought- (her mother was sick, Ed was fucking another woman, Catherine was stressed) and it's been fifteen years since she's used- _("One more, Eddie, Christ! - Please?") _Eddie fixed the line, held her head and checked her into a rehab facility the next day.

She buys an ounce from 'Frank' who grabs her ass once they've made the switch. Then she makes her way down the block to the diner. She runs the taps in the washroom to drown out the sucking sound.

When she lowers her head over her compact mirror, the reality of the situation is all too strange: high-heeled women going nose to nose with their own reflection when isn't that the thing that terrifies them most? Fucking crow's feet.

Time slips away with the graying of hair.

She can see the smooth even rim of her own eyeliner in the magnified compact mirror. The soft wrinkles around her eyes like off roads on a map. She sniffs half a line before she chokes on dust and her own swallowed tears. She pours the rest down the toilet and wipes her nose with the shaking tips of her fingers before she leaves.

It wasn't even enough to get high.

It wasn't even enough to get anywhere.

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Grissom finds Warrick in some run down shack half way into the city. He sees the Tahoe and goes in under the pretense of protecting the lab's equipment.

Daryl's Den used to be a convenience store with a bar next door. Now it's a bar with a casino next door. The whole place smells like damp tar and violence- the sweaty drunken kind.

"Yeah, well I figured this was as good a place as any for falling off a wagon." Warrick puts a loonie into the slot, pulls the lever, loses. Grissom spends 4 minutes watching Warrick put small circular discs into a noisy slot machine. Warrick spends 20 dollars in loonies and wins back eight in quarters.

That's 3960 dollars a day and now Grissom knows why Catherine watches Warrick as though she's building a case- as though he's a suspect and she's looking to get him for life: _"Human relation. We like what we can relate to."_

"Six billion people and at least six billion wagon's." Grissom finally says. He speaks in the same careful voice he uses while pinning moths to Styrofoam. "Why do people use destruction as an excuse to destroy?"

A woman with a feather boa and eye sockets like chipped egg cups puts her gold lamee purse down at the next slot machine. Grissom watches the woman speaking under her breath, muttering about menthol cigarettes and 'big money'.

"It's called roll with the punches Gris," says Warrick at last. When he stands to leave his pockets clink against his legs with the silver weight. "Shit head," spits the woman with the boa, as though Warrick had stolen money from her purse.

Warrick gives Grissom his keys ("You should drive.") and Gil Grissom holds the jagged metal scraps as though they were answers.

They drive in silence through traffic with the windows up and the radio off. _"It is wrong," _thinks Grissom, _"that eight dollars in quarters should weigh more than twenty dollars in loonies."_

Warrick taps a coin on the door handle. It's the only noise in the large cab.

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Warrick lets himself into the house and finds his wife in the bathroom with a towel around her body. He watches Tina through the clouds of steam as she brushes her damp hair. The brush pauses a moment when Warrick finally speaks.

"Hey."

"Hey baby, how was the funeral?"

"It was good-" faltering- "um, God no- I didn't mean good, just…" and he sees himself force a chuckle in the foggy mirror, "it was alright."

"Well, at least it's over," says Tina. Her brow wrinkles under the weight of her empathy. Then she undoes her mint colored towel from around her breasts and presses her naked body against him. Tina is still slightly damp from the bath water and his fingers stick to her skin as though he and she are made of different material.

They make love in the bedroom in the king size bed Tina brought with her when she first moved in. most of his clothes are still on while hers are off. She does all the screaming and he is silent; eyes wide.

Finally he softly bites her ear and when she looks into his eyes, bewildered, he whispers, "You smell like _Narcissus Pseudonarcissus_." A shadow passes behind her eyes and he realizes she never learned Latin. She smiles anyway, of course, but that doesn't change it. Catherine and her blonde hair like fire, is the opposite of his wife. Often, he finds himself speaking to the wrong woman. In a dead language he tells Tina of yellow flowers- Daffodils.

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Day six:

Two minutes after midnight on the sixth day. Sara gets up from the couch where she has been lying on top of Greg. He stretches his sore legs and tells her that she needs to get a futon. "Who actually makes it to the bedroom anymore?" he sasses and Sara just runs her finger back and forth along her jaw line slowly. "Drink?"

From the funeral they went back to the lab, still in their crisp ironed clothes. "I need to submit some prints," said Sara, forcefully shifting gears.

"And _I_ need to process some prints," said Greg. He rolled his window down and held his suit-clad arm out into the air. "It's starting to rain."

The windows in her car are made of safety glass- _"I have incriminated thirteen car thieves this year in Vegas alone."_ That morning she watched it rain, clear drops hitting like bullets from a pellet gun and their moisture bleeding down the windshield. She held her hand up to the pane while driving. Greg was watching her across the cab. She could smell his formal cologne like damp pine needles.

"Story of my life," she said- her fingers splayed over the glass.

It was five o'clock before he met her in the hall outside DNA with his coat in his arms. There was a moment of silence before Greg's face cracked and he teased her, "Don't you have some chandelier earrings kicking around here somewhere?" It was absurd. Who wore crushed velvet in a lab full of mucus samples and larvae?

He was going home, she wasn't but she agreed to take a break and they headed out the side doors to where his car was parked. They didn't talk much- didn't talk at all about the flavor of O negative blood and mirror dust or about the dead little girl whose name was in the corners of everyone's mouths.

Eventually Greg looked at his watch and suddenly it was, "Yow. I…uh, really have to get outta here."

After fifteen minutes in the rain Greg's shirt was slicked to his chest. He looked like a sculpture made of wet clay- _something beautiful there_- and Sara made a decision: Six years away from the ocean. Pieces of it fall from the sky like homesickness tears on the night Sara decides she's too tired to keep loving a ghost.

There was thunder rumbling when she took the keys from his wet hands and said she was driving them to her house.


	3. Chapter 3

_Still with me? Great. Part three._

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Nick goes home and drops his CSI kit with a bang in the middle of the living room carpet. He pours the contents out in a careless heap and stares at the sum total of his life- finds it unspeakably eerie. Hours spent with print dust in his hand and it occurs to him that the most substantial relationship he has is with fine powder and a bell head brush.

_"Been there."_ Catherine would relate.

Nick takes a glass from the cupboard above the sink and carries it to the living room floor. He prints the handle and swabs the rim. He looks for clues as to who he is by the picture on the side (a cartoon crocodile with a mischievous grin). It's always an epiphany when he realizes how much of a person's life is spare luggage. The way his mother forced him to bring four pairs of socks for an overnight camping trip. The way, in college, Dennis Colby carried seven condoms in his pocket when he went to his cousin's wedding. _"Brides maids Stokes! Brides maids!"_

He goes back to the fridge. Takes an over ripe peach from the freezer and stabs it with a knife.

The week after Nick joined the Las Vegas Crime Lab, his girlfriend left his house screaming curses and threats. She left him with a shattered lamp and a cut on his arm that should have gotten stitches. Nick cleaned up after the fight meticulously. There was something embarrassing about it- his own mini crime scene. He'd seen pictures of what a candle looks like if it hits the eye socket exactly right. He'd seen a woman convicted of 'assault by toothbrush'. He couldn't even count the felonies he'd learned of where the foreplay was a shattered lamp. He could be a rapist, he could be a murderer- things escalate.

After four days of wearing long sleeved shirts to work and changing his bandages in the bathroom during break, Grissom told him that it took less than a pound of pressure to break human skin.

"We're delicate creatures, Nicky." Said Grissom and never once did he glance at Nick's arm.

Nick admires the knife wound in the flesh of a peach. He wants to believe that death is as freakish as having a piano fall on your head- or at least as heavy. Instead he hears Grissom's calm rational: _"We make it heavy Nick. People need a weight for things... so they make their own." _

In Nick's kitchen the refrigerator is humming. He wipes his hands on his dress pants where the smell of fresh juice will dry sticky and fragrant. He lobs the peach into the kitchen sink. It splatters, leaving cast off in the metal basin. He leaves it there to rot. One more body he doesn't want to clean up.

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Five days ago:

Nick drives Catherine to the collision scene while she screams at him to speed faster ("Just get there!"). When she sees the body she jumps from the vehicle while it's still moving. "Catherine!" he yells as she hits the pavement and stumbles. She bites her lip on impact and he won't forget the look on her face: _"Goodbye Nicky." _Her long bangs in her eyes and a broken strap on her expensive shoes.

"Like flesh-" babbles the thirty two year old driver being questioned on the sidewalk. "It sounded like- I- I- I hit flesh." Nick is used to these kinds of testimonies. The moment where articulation fails and is replaced by the acrid smell of rubber heating the air.

Lindsey's arm is broken in six places so that when Catherine kneels over the body and tries to hold her daughter's hand it falls back upon the wrist like putty. The PD officers pull Catherine from the scene like a whirling devil and later when she's sitting on a check up bed with a brace on her ankle, she folds her hands cleanly in her lap and says, "I wonder what noise she made."

He doesn't answer. A dying body should sound like a piano- like the symphony Beethovan would have written if he could hear. Nick knows it doesn't.

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---

Standing by the front door, Sara takes her limp funeral clothes off. Greg watches her brace herself against the doorframe while she struggles with her sandals. To Greg she looks like liquid: painted shadows and cream and bright eyes. At 6 in the afternoon, the entire world is reduced to one-strap-at-a-time, starting with shoes and ending with her translucent black panty hose- the underwear beneath.

Half a year earlier she, he and Grissom worked a case. The case involved only the landlord but evidence led them to a tenant- a man who horded text. Somewhere amongst the pages would be a receipt for eight hundred pounds of white sand. Newspapers, notes, tax forms, novels- as they loaded fifteen truckloads of pages the man began to keen: "_please, don't ruin them- for the love of god, please."_

Some of the books had been forced onto the porch and gotten soaked- the pages melted together like wax. The three of them had worked a double, separating paper. It was only Grissom who could work without tearing the pages. _"Some people can't love people… so they love something else," _said Grissom and, in his own way, he taught them how to spare an innocent man anguish.

Sara lets Greg remove her panty hose. The way he goes about it, so slowly- she remembers a six-foot stack of water stained novels. Finally, one of his bitten fingernails snags a whole in the left thigh. She looks down and he looks up and the house is silent. Carefully, he traces his finger over the snag and when he exhales against her thigh she gasps. She makes the first tear. The spandex rips and stretches in their combined hands and she falls against his kneeling form before they can remove the tattered fabric.

They find the carpet first, rough and dark on a rainy afternoon. Sara digs her fingers into the floor as though she's trying not to slide off the earth. She's on top of him with her hands like claws beside his shoulders so he takes each hand and guides it into his messy hair. "Better grip," he says. When they're finished her fingers will smell sweet like hair gel.

By seven thirty she disappears into the bathroom and Greg finds her on the floor of her shower with soap in her eyes and blood running down her leg from a gash in her knee. "Shaving," she says but Greg thinks it sounds a bit like a faulty alibi. He presses the soap between their bodies and hangs on to her slippery skin. "If you go down the drain I'll have to take your shower apart to find you in the bend."

"I smell like death," says Sara flatly, and he repeats a line from long ago that makes her smile.

"A real man doesn't mind."

She has a habit of dressing in the hallway where the cool air dries her skin. He dresses in the bathroom and they lean in opposite directions against the same door. Sara's thinking, symmetry and applied force- two same objects imploding into one space and, _"sometimes, there is pain to be found in numbers."_

She moves to the kitchen where she reaches her arms towards the top of the cupboards, straining for a canister of coffee she's been keeping hidden, least she drink it and never sleep again. Greg sees her poised on slender tip toes as though for a dive and her pant leg lifts up, revealing the tattoo on her ankle.

In the kitchen with a can of Foldier's in her hand, sara turns to find greg standing in front of her, hard again and pressing her against the counter. It's only been ten minutes since they licked the bitter soap off of each other's skin in her shower.

600 seconds later she is still disoriented- overheated and slippery and, _"he can't possibly-"_

"What are you-" she begins but maybe tonight is not the time for finishing questions. He breaths into her jaw, "I'm not going to let you regret this."

Another five seconds and she drops the coffee grounds. With the lid off, they scatter like print powder on the linoleum. She can feel the dark grit sticking to her bare feet. "Caffeine addict," he mumbles against her chest as he lifts her onto the counter- contemplates genetics with heavy lidded eyes. "You're more perfect than I thought."

The room smells bitter and she tilts her head back, locks her eyes on the ceiling.

"Oh God… Oh God…" _("I don't believe in him anyway.")_

---

---

From Marty's diner Catherine drives to the coroner's. Al Robbins, who was not Lindsey's coroner, is in the middle of a man who ate two pounds of Mistletoe. That's what he tells Catharine when she shows up in his lab. When he leads her into the autopsy room she realizes he was being literal. The 'middle' of Robert Wallace turns out to be his stomach.

David is, ironically, still back at the funeral- a fact that Al alerts her to with a single raised eyebrow. "I don't see you sitting around the cemetery discussing tombstone etiquette," answers Catharine and Al just flicks his eyes back to his cadaver in the way that he often does. '_Press on' whisper the dead_.

"This one went slow," he says of the pale flesh decorating his slab. Catharine pulls on her own chalky latex gloves and traces her fingers lightly over the fingernails.

"Lucky for him."

"_The coldest thing in this room,"_ thinks Al, _"is not a corpse."_

He removes Wallace's liver with a sound like feet in mud. Catherine is playing with the man's wrist, watching it flop in its socket. "You have any female's in tonight, Doc? Any kids?" Despite her attempt to be casual her hands still shake.

It only took ten seconds for Al to notice Catherine's eyes- the pupils like eclipses. She stood before him in his own facility like some sort of post mortem harbinger, smelling of dust on dry grass. She smells like it's going to rain. His leg whispers thunder to him as well. It's the only thing he took away from The Accident.

Now Catherine's hands are all over the body of a dead man. She seems as though she's searching for wounds she can't find. Al revises his previous pronouncement:

"_The coldest thing in this room is not a corpse… **yet**."_

Al has three bodies left to go before he takes his lunch break. People wonder how he can eat after doing what he does. Any time he's ever attended lunch with a friend outside the business it's been forty minutes of, _"So Al, dig through any bowels today?" _and when Al answers, "Yes, actually," his friend gets a 'look' and chews his sandwich like the bread has turned to paste. "Fifteen year old female," Al continues sometimes, "and I have it on authority that fries and gravy was her last supper."

"_You're insane. How'd you figure that out?"_

Al just calmly chews his low-carb microwave burrito and says, "Hodges." And they don't ask.

Standing beside Robert Wallace, Catherine watches Al pick through the greenish black mass of partially digested leaves and she asks again: "Do you have any females?" This time when he raises one of his white eyebrows at her she sucks in her cheeks and bites, "Jesus Christ, fine! Do you have anyone who looks like my god damn daughter?"

"Catherine-" he begins to say but when he goes to place his gloved hand on hers he finds it is gone. Now she's over admiring his instruments under the glinting overhead lights. She is more dangerous than they are. Al would know- he's seen every laceration a perverted lunch-friend could imagine about a body. In the end it's the living who aren't there while you're speaking to them.

---

---

Once, after a gruesome double shift- (A T-bone collision between a tour bus and a semi), Al took David for drinks at some drab little counter-laminate-and-dart-boards type bar. They sat amidst men whose fingers would never stop smelling of tobacco and drank their malts. Al had let David fumble through ten minutes of conversation-

"_I'm not really very good with… I- I mean I don't usually practice my- although there is this one… someone. She's a- a new girl on Investigation. Really… smart and beautif- well I think she's-"_

Al eye-browed the waitress for another scotch and decided that work friendships may take as much tolerance as non-work friendships. But then, neuroses were not exclusive; he was 51 and in love with the one body he had never got to autopsy.

"Her name was Isobelle Keats," he began, interrupting David's Ode to Miss Sidle. "Caucasian female, 25 years old, 5'3", slim build, red head; ID on the body suggested Harvard Grad Student, member of a book club, archery club, paper mache club, In case of emergency contact Michael Keats- brother, or Al Robbin's- fiancé."

The waitress set down two more tumblers of scotch. She had one brown eye and one blue. Only .27 percent of the population had multicolor eyes. Al checked once and found that .55 percent of his autopsies have them. Something in the evasion of symmetry has made them more prone to disaster…

"Now you know my motivation. Why do you desire to spend your day with corpses, David?"

David looked as though someone had asked him to slow dance. He picked up his glass, set it down, picked it up again, smelled the amber liquid and grimaced as he drank it. David grimaced for a long time afterwards too, and then he said, "I think it… Well, I think it was the same reason you did."

Al was dabbing the table with a napkin but he glanced up to say, "C.O.P: Cause Of Profession- lets hear your theory."

David was dabbing his forehead with a napkin when he said, "Around the dead we can't be lonely or- or even grieve. We see them when they're… cold. In our profession no one ever dies."

Al just sipped his drink and thought, _"I never had a son."_

---

---

Sara and Greg lay on her couch in a heap of breath and limbs. After a while he reports it to be 11:38 PM. She finally asks him (not sure that she's joking) if he's been taking any little blue pills lately and he answers, (not sure if he's insulted or flattered), "well, I guess you're little and often kinda blue, but uh- nope."

He makes jokes while she makes coffee. He's wearing nothing but the too-big dress shirt he wore to the funeral and his white cotton socks. Sara is fully dressed accept for her belt which is undone and missing one of it's loops. "Am I going to have to take all those clothes off _again_? Because you _really_ know how to layer. I'm not sure if I can handle the suspense."

Sara finds a litre of precariously old milk and a can of whip cream on the back of her fridge. She's got raw tofu and bean sprouts that could qualify for a tox screening. Suddenly she isn't sure she can handle another box of Kraft Dinner. She lets the fridge door drift closed and turns to Greg- "I'll be right back."

From the hallway she calls, "Eat whatever you'd like but I think it's mostly olives and tofu." She hears his reply:

"I'll get it figured out."

Maybe what he means is, _"I'll get you figured out."_ Sara closes her eyes and takes a breath. She tries not to feel that Greg is twenty-five years too young to be figuring her out.

Her coffee is still too hot to drink and she burns her hands when she cups the mug. Her palms turn white and then scalded red- she can smell skin and steam when she carefully sets the mug down on the hard wood floor beside her knees. It takes a moment for her to find what she's looking for, buried in the bottom of her underwear drawer. After two years she's almost surprised when it's still there. One small bottle of _Xanax_. She taps three pills into her palm and admires them a moment.

Red and white red and white redandwhite.

They taste like nothing, like plastic coating and chemical dye. She burns them down with coffee and shuts the drawer. Greg is banging pots in the kitchen. Greg would worry if she told him. So she doesn't.

---

---

After Lindsey's Accident, Catherine walked the fifteen blocks home and sat at her kitchen table. She made coffee- weak because she couldn't find the table spoon so she used a soupspoon and guessed. She did a crossword in pen and finished it- _"I guess I'm not in shock,"_ and then she brushed her teeth, put on her high heeled boots and left for work. When she went by Lindsey's bedroom door she had silently pulled it closed.

Grissom put her on a B and E in the suburbs. The neighbor broke in and was setting up his newly acquired plasma screen when PD arrived to arrest him. Catharine went and stood in front of Grissom's desk with her sunglasses on. "Have you been smoking, Catherine?"

"_Don't_. Do this," said Catherine but it was the way she stood, like the Salvador Dali vision of a ballerina that made Grissom put her on the potential 4:19.

---

---

She breaks the case:

"Dean Rathers committed suicide. There was nothing for me to solve."

"It said in your report his daughter was murdered by a mugger."

It's been 24 hours since Catherine left his office and she hasn't been home yet. Grissom hasn't either.

"Oh _so what_ Grissom? He's dead. We move on."

And very calmly: "The day he jumped was the day before his daughter's funeral Catherine."

Catharine slams down her hand on his desk. She is still gripping her sunglasses. The dark lenses shudder and an arm snaps off. "You wanna stop me from taking a swan dive off the Monaco?" She chucks the ruined frames into the garbage can and leaves. As she goes she spits her threat: "Give me a fucking case. That'll keep me busy."

Three days later she watches while Doc Robbins squeezes toxic black liquid out of Mr. Wallace's liver. He tells her to go home. She lashes; "I bet _you'd_ love to take me home." it's the least professional thing she's ever said. She's got red eyes and no color. She could be an elderly man if it weren't for the eyelashes. He looks at her as though she's ugly and maybe she is. She feels gaunt, the way a starving person must feel, as though their skin is afraid.

Lindsey's coroner left a message on her cell phone- _"We need you to come pick the outfit." _Catherine was in the middle of the desert with sand in her mouth and her sunglasses lying broken in the trash can in Grissom's office. The coroners dressed Lindsey in a frock with white daisies on it. Catherine stood over the casket at the funeral and counted to ten. Turned away.

When she left the Graveyard the dew on the lawn was cold against her bare toes. Somewhere is St. Gabriel's Cemetery is the tread from the bottom of her stiletto heal. Catherine already threw those shoes away.

---

---

Catherine stands across the autopsy table from Al and grips a scalpel in her hands. She twists her fingers around it until she slips and the blade slices into her palm- right through the glove. Through the slice in the white rubber she can smell clammy skin. Al finally takes the instrument from her and sets it aside from the others with a sigh. "Fuck," says Catherine quietly. He'll throw her out in a minute. She heads for the door.

When she gets to the exit she stops with her back turned to him. She puts her hands on either side of the door and spreads her fingers over the metal. "Why the hell would Robert Wallace eat Mistletoe?"

Al can tell by the way she demands an answer that she needs one. He contemplates his next stitch as well as the lithe redhead spread across his doorway. He's so used to seeing bodies who have destroyed themselves in their search for proof- he remembers Catherine's pupils like oil spills and thinks, _"Silly girl, there is no proof here."_

"Maybe he wanted to know he could," says Al. She leaves without another sound.

Al is already sewing up the body cavity. Catherine wants to stay. She wants to know what Lindsey's coroner felt when he pushed a needle through her daughter's skin and knew he would never see inside of her again. Catherine thinks it must be like sniffing coke- being inside of someone. More than sex even- being able to hollow a person out and explore, the way a child might explore a snow cave. Like stripping accept with stripping it's more like sonar than sight.

_Know thy body. Know thy customer._ An autopsy isn't so different. The smell of fine linen suits on wealthy gentlemen; she's never forgotten. Doc Robbins looks at her and thinks, _"If I could cut the tendons in her calves, her ankles wouldn't have to suffer through those heels."_

Warrick's fingers touched that point between her breasts where the Y of the stitches divides. At the time she'd thought it was an accident. He smelled like leather and root beer and she'd thought, _"He would tell me I was beautiful and I would come. He would bring me Popsicles in bed and lick my sticky fingers. The color of his Popsicle and mine would mix and turn orange as though the sunset had stained us." _

41 hours later Catharine thinks it is human instinct that brought Warrick's hand to her skin. The same way she stood over Lindsey in a room full of people wearing black and wanted to feel through Lindsey's dress for the stitches she knew were there. Like a valediction forbidding loneliness, forbidding grief. Catharine had counted to ten and turned away.

On occasion there are bugs in a flower's bloom. The mortician had put Lindsey in a daisy dress. Lindsey hated daisies. Sometimes she found spiders hiding beneath the petals.


	4. Chapter 4

_And finally: La Fin! Thanks for reading. Even more thanks if you commented as well._

---

Sara's mother is in the hospital. A bruised eye socket and a tendency for staying in bed till four in the afternoon. The blankets are scratchy blue against Sara's chewed cuticles.

When the doctor asks them what happened to Laura's eye both parents grip Sara's hands until she can feel her knuckles pop. The doctor doesn't notice. "She fell down the stairs," says Sara levelly. The doctor writes her mother a prescription for both painkillers and anti-depressants. When he leaves the room Laura lets go of Sara's hand. Sara shakes the pain out of her fingers like water, flung in droplets from the skin.

---

---

Laura wiping blood from her hands… Just a body and a few small specks on her sky blue shirt- that's all that is left of Sara's father. The body on the floor is still- is six foot three- is broken by a bullet the size of Sara's pinky finger. Just the tip.

Until tonight Sara has never understood what it was like to be frozen solid. Nervous Sara with her thin hair, slanting mouth, long words too big for her tongue to hold so they tumble out in a mess. She never stops moving. She wakes up in the morning with her Gulliver's Travel's blanket kicked to the floor- tossing in her sleep. The house is always cold and she usually wakes up shivering.

While the men cuff Laura, her daughter is answering questions about gunshots and fistfights. "Hold my hand really tight okay?" says the woman in the suit coat and men's work shoes. Sara wraps her skinny fingers around the woman's wrist instead, imitating the way she has seen her father grip her mother when he doesn't want Laura to run away. Sara can't let go if she tries. As her and the older woman go past the body and out the front door, Sara doesn't turn to look. _"That's not my father,"_ she thinks. And again, outside in the noise and flash lights, _"That's not my mother. That is handcuffs, that is, "Sara, you fucking little brat-", that is blood on the living room wall."_

---

---

Grissom dissects a fetal pig in his living room. He's been working non-stop in the lab for six days (six years). He dropped a beaker full of tap water this evening and stood a full five minutes observing the way the water spread over the floor _(surface tension breaks invisibly- like fevers and hearts). _When Mia went by and saw Grissom standing motionless she voiced her concern and Grissom promised to clock out.

He boils herbal tea and listens to classical music. The fetal pig has only one kidney. He checks the whole body cavity. He even phones Doc Robbins to get additional information.

---

---

Doc Robbins isn't answering the phone. He's drinking single malt scotches one after another in a bar near the Tropicana. Robbins' even tips a stripper without getting a dance. Tells himself- _"I appreciate symbolism- not subtlety."_

"_Poor strawberry blonde girl,"_ he thinks. _"You can't ever get out."_

_---_

---

It was thirteen years ago when Grissom called her on the first night in her new house. Ed was out, the house was big and he wanted to tell her about a shipment of hissing cockroaches that had arrived at the lab. Catherine's response had been a sleepy, "How fast did you say they go again?" and when he obviously couldn't sleep she had conceded, "Well, I was going too take Lindsey for a drive anyway. I swear she hasn't slept in a week."

He came to get her in his coughing Mustang and they drove through the darkness. Five miles across town just to see two thousand Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches packed into crates. The night was lit with orange glowing streetlights as they made the trip in silence- accept for the sound of Lindsey's gentle fussing, Catherine's low mumbling lullabies.

_Hush little baby- butterflies_

_they'll be landing on your eyes._

_We're gonna catch them up for you._

_Grissom's gonna teach you something new._

_So hush little girl cuz' we're CSI's._

_We'll catch all of your bad guys._

_---_

---

It takes Grissom until 12:12 before he dials her number into the cordless phone. She answers with a response that may be a, "Hello?" but is too exhausted to achieve the syllables.

"I've found a pig with only one kidney," he says into the receiver, waits. It's only a moment before he can hear her legs sliding to the floor with a muffled _thump_. Despite the storm outside and a bad connection, she knows a call for back up when she hears one.

Twenty minutes later Catherine knocks twice on his door. She's let herself in before he gets halfway there. "So," she says with some sort of make shift conviction, "lets see this pig."

---

---

It's six weeks before Sara meets Cindy Barb, her foster mom. It is six days in Cindy's house before they find Sara unconscious on the sidewalk of some suburban street. Sara had taken her coat off and sat on the curb all night. At 8 in the morning she is stiff and cold on a strangers couch when Cindy arrives- squealing tires and too much lipstick.

"What the _hell_ were you doing?" Cindy demands.

"Nothing," says Sara, "I was doing nothing."

Of course, she's much too young to be speaking literally.

---

---

The doctors at the hospital treat her for minor Hypothermia- (_"Jesus Christ child! It's January!_") -and then for manic depression. "She isn't sad all the time," argues Cindy who doesn't want to get stuck with the bill.

"Depression means slow. Manic means... um... fast," Explains Sara, "so I'm probably only half sad." She remembers what Laura used to say when her medication wasn't working: _"It's not easy being a contradiction."_

They give Cindy a bottle of pills for Sara. The pills rattle noisily in the quiet room. Sara remembers the name of the pills from a year before: her mother's pills… her mother's daughter.

"_I'm just like her,"_ thinks Sara. _"I'm already just like her."_

---

---

It's been two hours since Grissom sat behind tinted glass and said to a felon, "She offered you a new life- with her." Sara still feels electrified.

From the lab she takes the highway to her doctors office- tells him about night terrors, insomnia, difficulty breathing, and a persistent desire to down a bottle of Jack Daniels. Sara kind of loves the health system in America. Two hours is all it takes to be given enough antidepressant medication to commit suicide ten times over.

She isn't even sure she'll use any. Not yet at least.

Sara holds the small bottle in her palm. She counts the pills on her dining room table while she should be sleeping. She quit taking antidepressants when she was sixteen. She sold them to Billy Trenton for enough money to buy a telescope and a microscope from the pawnshop.

---

---

Six days after Lindsey dies, Sara comes back into the kitchen pondering the calming effect of a microscope versus the calming effect of a telescope versus the calming effect of three little red and white pills. The ability to see things both infinitely small and infinitely large has always steadied her shaking hands. To have no desire for the universe at all?

She trails her fingertips along the hallway drywall. The light from the kitchen illuminates the hall in a listless glow. _"I can do this,"_ she thinks. She feels like ash- weightless, burnt free of its earthly potential. _"It is my choice to do this."_

She register's Greg sitting cross-legged on her living room carpet with a smirk and a can of whipped cream. "You _are_ game for anything." marvels Sara before she sits down beside him. He smells like her shampoo. She finds it distantly terrifying:

He will lay her down on the living room floor (the second time in six hours) and slowly pull her t-shirt up up up until it catches on her underarms. He will straddle her and she will see chunks of bleached blonde hair falling into his eyes like star points. He will use stale whip cream to draw her flowers on her own stomach and his voice will be terrified when he jokes, "Come on Sidle, I'll teach you how to laugh at death."

---

---

Warrick and Tina drink coolers in bed and she walks her fingers up his thigh beneath the covers. When she stretches one long arm down to the floor and chucks his jeans back up towards the headboard they clink heavily against his chest. The sound of nine dollars in quarters- gambler's bells.

It only takes a moment of startled silence before she's saying, "Baby, would you pass me my cooler- yeah, thanks." and she's scrambled back against his side again. She's got her cooler by the neck though and her fingers around it like a vice.

"Tina look, I'm not-"

"I know baby-" 

"I mean it was a _hell_ this afternoon but I wouldn't-"

"I know-"

"I promise I would tell you if I ever even-"

She gives him a firm push into the pillow- "I _know_, Warrick."

She kisses him into silence and her mouth is full of apple cooler. The pillow gets soaked but her mouth tastes sharp and sweet. When she pulls away she lingers to lick the sticky foam from his lips. He's still got worry lines in his forehead when he sees that she's smiling. "You know that whole 'me trusting you' thing? I wasn't kidding."

Eventually, maybe, he and Catherine will fuck each other in the women's bathroom at work with the "Out of Order," sign on the door. _"Leave the desperate gasps and forays towards 'healing' for Grissom and Sara."_ Catherine will settle for just plain desperate.

She won't even bother with a condom, not that it's much of a worry at her age. When she sags into his chest, Warrick will lean her against the stall door and she will remind him, with sorrow in her voice, that he's been in the women's bathroom once before.

His lips will form the word. She'll laugh. But they're long past intimacy.

"Rush."

"Yes it is."

---

---

When Lindsey's wrist bones fell apart in her hands Catherine didn't cry. She bit a whole in her lip. It will scar. But she didn't cry.

The first time Catherine cries is in Gil Grissom's living room- on her knees in front of him as if she's praying but the words are only obscenities.

When she follows him into his living room she is in a stencil t-shirt ("Drama Queen") and pajama bottoms. There are still traces of long wearing lipstick around the corners of her mouth. She takes one look down at the coffee table covered in newspaper and feels, for the first time, cold. "Miss Piggy." She is silent a moment. The room ticks.

"Gil that's- you cut open your pig." He hadn't counted on her noticing. When she does notice she falls- like deflating- to the floor.

"It was already dead Catherine."

If he could he would fall beside her.

He had wanted to do something painful. The pig had simply been there. Catherine is sobbing with her hands to her mouth like she's trying to swallow her fists. He's got a fifteen-year-old pig in pieces on the table, a fifteen-year-old friendship in pieces on the floor and of the two it's Catherine who is clutching her chest as though her organs are missing.

He puts a blanket over her and when she eventually stops quivering he falls asleep in a chair at the kitchen table. He realizes somewhere before dawn that Catherine is wearing Lindsey's shirt. When he wakes, his apartment smells like formaldehyde.

---

---

Six days.

In Sara's purple living room her stomach is laid out in front of Greg like paper. "Now you're sugar coated," he says, "and I love you."

The last part is accidental.

Greg lies beside her until dawn, saying nothing else. The telephone rings at 7:30 AM and the way Sara holds the receiver, he knows. "Telemarketer," she whispers. Her voice crumbles on the fifth syllable. The horizon is bleeding out in a pool around them- the sun is a gunshot wound.

"You were hoping it was Grissom, right?"

If she breaks him when she nods then he doesn't show it. Her silent tears drip into a bowl of cereal. He makes her a happy face out of his cheerios.

They kiss and their mouths taste like milk.

---

---

Nick spends a week getting drunk and Warrick volunteers his wife's coolers for at least one of these occasions. _"Man, this crap tastes like soda pop."_

Bras, ironically, consumes four pounds of deep fried pastries in three days and ends up in the hospital with a doctor telling him, "Gall stones. You're Gall Bladder will have to be removed." The humor is not lost on Brass who punches his fist through a vending machine in the lobby.

---

---

Catherine leaves Grissom's house the next day because he won't offer to fold out the couch and she won't ask. Before she leaves he gives her a hissing cockroach in a jar to keep her company. She stands by the front door in rumpled pajamas and a floor length coat and asks him, "Why did you cut up the pig?"

He shrugs. "I needed a specimen."

Once she leaves he slowly carries vital organs to the garbage can. He considers Catherine's question in the context of ancient mythology. It's the same question he had impressed upon Warrick the day before.

"_Why do people use destruction as an excuse to destroy?"_

In fifth grade Grissom discovered the myth of the phoenix. He thinks perhaps the story was misleading. After all, it isn't the dead who burn. It is the tired.


End file.
